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Programming C# with Visual Studio .Net 2005

Format: Paperback
Author: Jeffery Suddeth
ReleaseDate: March, 2006
Publisher: Lulu Press
Rating:

right on the mark
He did a Great job! It's totally on the mark. I'm on chapter 8 and totally enjoying this book. FWIW, I'm an experienced developer but new to C# and Visual Studio and while I have a fairly huge collection of books (because I live in a small town in Alaska and you can't check things out before you buy nor run down to your local book/computer store to pickup a reference) this is one of the few programming books I'm ever likely to read cover to cover.

There are a few typos/errors, but they're readily discernable from the text and aren't likely to mislead you if you're paying attention to context.

A Good Solid Tutorial Approach to C#
Like the old joke, we know what we are, we just quibble about the price. Problem: Someone came by and was willing to pay a rather large amount of money for a project but insisted on C#.

OK, so now I need to know C#, and I need to know it quickly. The solution to that problem (regardless of the language) is really simple - a trip to the bookstore.

I bought three different books on C#. I often do this, as just looking them over in the store may be misleading. I took all three, and started reading in each of them. I usually find that I then begin to concentrate my time on one of the books.

I started on this one last - visually it's kind of dull. On the other hand, by page 9 I was typing in a short program. By Golly, it worked. It didn't do much, just printed a line of text, but I had a program running. That way I was able to prove that the installation of the software was working, I could see a bit of the basic C# structure, and it printed something. There are really only four things that a program does I/O, logic, arithmetic, and data storage. In only a few minutes I had done at least a simple output.

This new book covers the latest version of C#, Visual Studio and the . NET framework. It took me about a week to go through the book, the next week I read the other two books and got some very good ideas just from from the fact that they worded things differently. When I got started on the gig, I could hold my own with the other C# programmers. And that's all you can possibly ask of a book.

This was not my first programming language. I've worked in at least a dozen languages over the years, maybe two dozen. I don't know if I would pick this book for the complete beginner unless it was for a class where the instructor could provide some additional direction.

On the other hand, when I was a complete beginner they handed me an assembly language programming book and told me to go read it (This was long, long ago when the world was still flat). This book is a hell of a lot easier than the way I started. .

Good solid information
The material was presented with a great balance of explanation and examples. As both a programmer, and an instructor, I have to say I really appreciated this book. The examples were simple but based on real life topics (so the reader could easily imagine the true usefullness of the concept being illustrated. ) And the author did a great job of introducing forward concepts (that is, bringing the reader a taste of more advanced topics in a way that is comprehensible to a bright beginner. ) The editing errors mentioned by another reader were minor and did not interfere with understanding -- I have seen worse editing in technical books put out by major technical publishers. And I am pleased to say that all the examples I downloaded from the author's web site compiled and ran correctly (also were available in nice small files. ).